In his book Intuition Pump and other tools for thinkingDaniel Dennett’s first intuition is to extoll the virtue of daring to be wrong, which he describes as:
Sometimes just risk You make mistakes not because you want to make them, but because you want to make them just so you have something clear and detailed to correct. Making mistakes is the key to progress. Of course, there are times when it is really important not to make mistakes — just ask a surgeon or an airline pilot. But what is less known is that sometimes making mistakes is the only way forward. Many students who get into competitive universities pride themselves on not making mistakes. After all, that’s how they’ve been led to believe they’ve made so much more progress than their classmates. I often find myself having to encourage them to make mistakes. Cultivate the Habit Making mistakes is the best learning opportunity. They get into “writer’s block” and they spend hours at the starting line, wasting time in solitude. I urge them, “Just go ahead and write!” And they get something down on paper.
This reminds me of the old joke about what to do if you want to carve an elephant out of granite. The tongue-in-cheek advice is to start with a big block of granite and chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant. Dennett advocates a similar approach: throwing the disembodied block of granite out, and then chipping away everything that doesn’t work as mistakes are found and corrected.
Dennett cheerfully describes herself as “an experienced mistake-maker. I’ve made a few mistakes, and I want to make many more.” But the key to being a good mistake-maker, Dennett says, is a willingness, even a desire, to have your ideas scraped.
The main secret to making good mistakes is not to hide them, especially not from yourself. When you make a mistake, instead of denying it and turning away, you need to become a connoisseur of your mistake and ruminate on it in your mind as if it were a work of art. In a way, mistakes are works of art. The secret is to use the specific details of the mess you made so that your next attempt will build on that mess and not just be a blind attempt.
Mistakes are a good thing if they can be identified quickly, corrected, and learned from. Most new ideas are terrible This is true whether new ideas come from private actors in the market or from policymakers acting from the state. The crucial difference is that while mistakes can be identified and corrected quickly in markets, the same cannot be said for the mistakes of policymakers.
For example, in my post explaining that most new ideas are terrible, I used the example of an upcoming tech product called the R1 Rabbit to explain why I thought it would fail. After I wrote that, the product was released, and since then, the product has indeed failed. Pretty badAnother product I should have mentioned in that post was the Humane AI Pin, which seemed even more half-baked to me. Become The general consensus is that Humain is currently looking at products Returned At a pace faster than they can be sold.
I don’t think these two companies will last long. A lot of time, effort and money went into starting a company and building a product, and some people ended up spending money to get a half-baked product. This is certainly not ideal, but the correction is happening fast.
Let me compare this to another bad policy I recently implemented. HighlightWilliam III imposed a tax on windows on the assumption that houses and buildings with many windows were more likely to be owned by the wealthy, and thus it would provide a way to tax the wealthy. However, as recorded in Scott Hodge’s book, Taxation“This tax made conditions especially dire for the urban poor, as landlords blocked up windows and built tenements that lacked adequate light and ventilation. Some buildings had no windows on some floors, leading to the spread of many diseases, including dysentery, gangrene, and typhoid.”
This was also less than ideal. People lived in unnecessarily miserable, dark, and stifling conditions. Disease spread quickly, taking many lives and causing great pain and suffering to those who survived. This, too, was eventually resolved and the tax was repealed. However, the tax and its harmful effects continued. 150 years Before that happens.
Entrepreneurs are not necessarily smarter than government policymakers, nor do they have any inherent ability to come up with better ideas. But when entrepreneurs make mistakes, their mistakes don’t last long. Policymakers can make mistakes that cause illness, suffering, and death, and those policies can continue for the rest of a human’s lifetime until the error is corrected.
Arnold Kling often preached the mantra, “Markets fail. Exploit markets.” And rightly so, because markets fail quickly and correct quickly. Dennett advises his students not to hide their mistakes, especially from themselves. But national policymakers have the ability to hide or overlook mistakes in a way that markets do not have, making them last almost to the point of immortality.
